Nepal earthquake: fears grow for remote villages as over 4,000 confirmed dead

At least 4,000 people have been killed and more than 100,000 left homeless by the earthquake in Nepal, officials have said, as the search intensified for those in remote villages that are out of the reach of rescue teams.

However, reports from the remote Nepalese district of Ghorka, close to the epicentre of Saturday’s quake, suggest the number of casualties could be fewer than has been feared – even if a high proportion of buildings were badly damaged.

Officials said on Monday the total number of dead and wounded in Ghorka was still unclear but, having had contact with most of their outlying administrators, they thought it would be “in the hundreds, not the thousands”.

By late-afternoon, the overall confirmed total across the country was 3,922 dead and nearly 7,180 injured, with a further 85 dead in India. An avalanche triggered by the quake killed 18 people at Mount Everest’s base camp, while 85 people were killed in India and China.

More than 1,300 of the fatalities were from the heavily populated Kathmandu valley, while another 944 were from the district of Sindulpalchuk, east of the Nepalese capital.

Mountainous areas to the west of the epicentre – such as Manaslu, Dhaulagiri and Annapurna – had experienced only light damage, officials and trekking agencies said.

In Kavre district, as elsewhere, the growing problem is the huge number of homeless people. Of a population of 380,000, not more than 250 have been killed and around 900 injured, said the chief administrator, Sudarshan Parsad Dhakal. But, Dhakal said, about 100,000 people had lost their homes.

“It is not just the buildings that are in ruins. There are many others that are now uninhabitable. We need at least 3,000 family tents, blankets too and dry food for three days,” he said.

In Kathmandu itself remains are still being brought out of the rubble. In one outlying district, Bhaktapur, about 30,000 people are thought to be homeless, officials say.

The earthquake – Nepal’s worst in more than 80 years – has left thousands sleeping in the open while authorities battle against time to rescue anyone still alive beneath the rubble.

As the Nepalese government stepped up its calls for urgent international help, the UN children’s agency, Unicef, warned of an increased risk of waterborne and infectious diseases, and the World Food Programme said it was preparing to launch a massive aid operation.

The devastation caused by the quake, which struck just before noon on Saturday, is stretching medical services in the impoverished and unprepared Himalayan nation to breaking point.

“We are overwhelmed with rescue and assistance requests from all across the country,” said Deepak Panda, a member of the country’s disaster management agency. Lila Mani Poudyal, the government’s chief secretary and the rescue coordinator, appealed for more help from the international community, saying Nepal was short of everything from paramedics to electricity.

“We are appealing for tents, dry goods, blankets, mattresses, and 80 different medicines ... that we desperately need now,” he told reporters. “We don’t have the helicopters that we need or the expertise to rescue the people trapped.”

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Hospital beds in Kathmandu are already full, forcing other sick and injured people to seek makeshift treatment in the street alongside thousands of displaced survivors whose homes were destroyed or are in imminent danger of collapse after being weakened by the 7.8-magnitute quake.

On Monday, the disasters emergency committee – a coalition of UK aid charities including Oxfam, Save the Children and the British Red Cross – launched an appeal in response to the crisis.

Matt Darvas, who works for World Vision Australia and arrived in Gorkha on Monday, said locals had told him 90% of the houses in their villages had been destroyed. “Many of these villages are one or two days’ walk from the main village at the best of times – and now that they are cut off completely and may be without clean water, adequate food, shelter and basic medical supplies,” he said.

Darvas warned that it could be days before some of the more remote villagers are reached by rescue teams. “Many are situated on the steep slopes of very precarious mountains and hillsides, where there will still be risks of landslide in coming days.

“Currently, helicopters are struggling to even conduct surveillance flights around these mountains due to heavy cloud cover – let alone land to render any aid.”

On Mount Everest, the evacuation began on Monday of hundreds of climbers trapped after a huge avalanche flattened the base camp, killing 18 and injuring 61 in the worst disaster to hit the mountain. The death toll on the mountain is likely to rise as no one knows how many people were at base camp and in the vicinity.

Many of the dead are locals, making this the second year running that the sherpa and other communities have been hit hard on Everest. Only one of the major expeditions has its camp intact and it seems very unlikely anyone will be continuing any climb on the peak.

While survivors wait for aid, rescue teams are continuing the frantic search for survivors, despite being exhausted by two nights of ceaseless work. “The rescue workers are in a really bad shape. We are all about to collapse. We have worked two straight nights,” said home ministry official Laxmi Prasad Dhakal.

Rescuers used their bare hands, with no protective gear or heat detectors, in their search for survivors in what remains of the Dharahara tower. The narrow alleys would stop cranes, earthmovers or diggers reaching most of the houses that have collapsed, even if the aftershocks had not scared workers out of even trying, said Shyam Adhikari, the local police chief.

“Anyway, there’s not much point. There are some entire families buried. We know because no one reported them missing. No one is alive under the rubble,” he said.

With so many people sleeping in the open with no power or water and downpours forecast, there were mounting fears of major food and water shortages.

“There is no electricity, no water. Our main challenge and priority is to restore electricity and water,” Dhakal at the home ministry said. “The next big challenge is the supply of food. Shopkeepers are unable to go in and open their shops. So people are facing difficulty buying food.”

The disaster has prompted a huge international relief operation, although local reports suggest that much of the aid has yet to materialise on the ground due to strong aftershocks that closed Kathmandu’s main airport several times on Sunday.

India flew in medical supplies and members of its disaster response force, while China sent a 60-strong emergency team. Pakistan’s army said it was sending four C-130 aircraft with a 30-bed hospital, search-and-rescue teams and relief supplies.

A US military aircraft with 70 personnel was due to arrive in Kathmandu on Monday. Australia, Britain and New Zealand said they were sending specialist urban search-and-rescue teams to Kathmandu. Britain was also delivering supplies and medics.

The immediate aftermath has underlined Nepal’s inability to cope with a disaster of this scale. The country has a population of 28 million and only 2.1 doctors and 50 hospital beds for every 10,000 people, according to the World Health Organisation.

“The earthquake has exposed that Nepal’s best public hospital infrastructure has crumbled at a time when it should serve more people in a hurry,” said Sarvendra Moongla, a senior surgeon at Bir Hospital’s trauma centre in Kathmandu.